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[Tales of] Your Mom - Best Dog Is Back

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Hearing people complain about going back to Vesperia after Berseria is very exciting, because I haven't played Berseria yet but I am hoping to sometime this year and I am getting amazingly hyped. Better than Vesperia???!

I think whichever game you played first factors into it a bit. Maybe if I'd played Vesperia first, I'd have those fond memories tied to it or something, I dunno. Berseria, IMO, is just so damn good. Interesting story and characters, and a fast/fluid combat system that's flashy and satisfyingly fun to play around with.

I dropped Vesperia after a couple hours because the characters weren't doing anything for me, the story felt non-existent, and the combat was beyond clunky and boring. Also the English VA is atrocious, which is odd because I think I heard Troy Baker in there? He's not usually so awful, but I guess Yuri was one of his earlier roles? (was he even Yuri?)

Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.

Hearing people complain about going back to Vesperia after Berseria is very exciting, because I haven't played Berseria yet but I am hoping to sometime this year and I am getting amazingly hyped. Better than Vesperia???!

I think whichever game you played first factors into it a bit. Maybe if I'd played Vesperia first, I'd have those fond memories tied to it or something, I dunno. Berseria, IMO, is just so damn good. Interesting story and characters, and a fast/fluid combat system that's flashy and satisfyingly fun to play around with.

I dropped Vesperia after a couple hours because the characters weren't doing anything for me, the story felt non-existent, and the combat was beyond clunky and boring. Also the English VA is atrocious, which is odd because I think I heard Troy Baker in there? He's not usually so awful, but I guess Yuri was one of his earlier roles? (was he even Yuri?)

OK, so, Troy Baker was indeed Yuri and I believe it was one of his earlier roles when he wasn't famous and expensive. Also, when Vesperia was first released, not everything was voiced.

Fast forward to now, and the Vesperia re-release is going to be fully voiced. But Troy Baker is a lot more expensive now. So all the new Yuri lines are voiced by Grant George doing a Troy Baker impression.

The main issue with recent tales games (or well, all of them post vesperia) is dull world design. They are mostly more polished when it comes to combat and game systems, and which characters you prefer come down to preference. Zestiria is the glaring outlier here, but that's because zestiria is impressively bad in pretty much every way.

Berseria is the only game I personally like more than Vesperia, due to how well the characters and the story work together. But replaying vesperia has me remembering how much more alive the world feels in that game compared to the recent ones. Vesperia has some severe issues early one with combat and story pacing, but it does a great job with it midgame. The final part is kind of out of left field, but at that point the characters work together well enough to carry it to the end.

I am nearly always confused by this criticism for almost every game. Outside of indies and REALLY bad no-budget releases, no games have VA I would even call bad. I have no idea what the standard is, when Vesperia can be considered atrocious. I don't know if people are confusing script for delivery or what. Estelle is one of the most genuine-sounding characters I think I've heard in a long time.

I don't know what the standard is either, but I know when something sounds bad or weird to me and Vesperia is pretty bad. All the lines are delivered in weird, awkward and emotionless ways. Maybe it gets better later on or something, but I changed it to the Japanese VA pretty quick.

Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.

This is just using the comment as a springboard more generically, I see people calling the VA atrocious for nearly every game which makes me discount the criticism because they can't possibly all be bad. It's probably not the same people making the criticism every time, but that just makes it more dismissable to me. Zelda, Octopath...I just don't get it.

Oh man, Zelda. People complained so hard about Zelda’s voice acting in BOTW, and my own experience is so far removed from the complaints that I can’t really think of any response other than “no?” Like, I legit can’t begin to respond because it’s like we’re looking at different things entirely; there’s no common ground to argue on.

And it’s not like I don’t know what bad voice acting is like. I played Arc Rise Fantasia.

Having teenaged RPG leads is really cool until you stop being a teenager yourself. Do you remember being seventeen? You're a dumbass at seventeen! I wanna be saved by the guy who's twenty-seven. He's at least payed taxes. He knows how to do shit. He can drive.

The new VA is a bit flat and phoned in. A lot of it is dialog that wasn't important enough to be voiced in the first place, so it's whatever. Nothing stood out as bad and I'm glad they put in the effort.

Whatever studio did the English port half-assed it though. Some of the new skits have weird mixing/volume issues, some location names are pronounced inconsistently, and they didn't even bother to ask Yuri's original VA to reprise the role. That's on top of various typos in the script.

I'm 46 hours into the game, I think I've been to all towns in the world, the whole world map is revealed, and in a place called Egothor Forest I think the game finally showed me what a hoplon blastia is and what it does after talking about it for the whole game. Like, not in a sense of building up something I wasn't supposed to know about. They just completely forgot to show, don't tell, this entire time. From context clues I understood that it was essentially a magic cannon, but they FINALLY decided to show me one. Sure enough, if you google "what is a hoplon blastia" you will only see pics and references from this part of the game.

If it was my game to design I would've put one back in the very start at Deidon Hold and had it fire on the monsters attacking the gate to demonstrate vital information/world building to the player, but that's just me...

At least it's not as bad as the completely nebulous fonic-everything in Tales of the Abyss!

I'm 46 hours into the game, I think I've been to all towns in the world, the whole world map is revealed, and in a place called Egothor Forest I think the game finally showed me what a hoplon blastia is and what it does after talking about it for the while game. Like, not in a sense of building up something I wasn't supposed to know about. They just completely forgot to show, don't tell, this entire time. From context clues I understood that it was essentially a magic cannon, but they FINALLY decided to show me one. Sure enough, if you google "what is a hoplon blastia" you will only see pics and references from this part of the game.

If it was my game to design I would've put one back in the very start at Deidon Hold and had it fire on the monsters attacking the gate to demonstrate vital information/world building to the player, but that's just me...

At least it's not as bad as the completely nebulous fonic-everything in Tales of the Abyss!

I know I just keep complaining about this game. But I'm playing through it and noticing things and it's fun (both the game and complaining about it) so whatever.

The sudden reveal of the true villain was really poorly handled.

Estelle disappears, they track her likely destination as the desert, we go there and see Duke taking off, Alexei arrives and says "ah, I'm too late." Everyone is IMMEDIATELY hostile towards him, he says a couple sentences about how you're foolish fools and pawns, and...that's basically it? "Oh you were pulling all the strings! We hate you now!" I'm not saying that they needed to be struggling to consider him a bad guy, but they could at least grapple a little with what this actually means. It's handled about as cartoonishly as everything else in the game. In scenes for the next several hours people are calling him straight up evil, and a big meanie, and saying watch out we're comin' for you we're gonna stop you, and no one ever stops to think about...I don't know, how he accomplished all this, how each of his puppets served his goals, what the heck are his goals anyway? No one ever asks him why. Not that he would answer in any case, but it's all so one dimensional. Now I guess you're the bad guy, and we're takin' you down!

I will say by contrast, the other reveal shortly afterward was handled a lot better and was more interesting.

The fact that Raven was actually Schwann. I had wondered who Schwann was, and it added some dimension to some of the characters. And it was just...I dunno, handled better emotionally. I later remembered the moment Raven said "ten hut!" and "magically" got the Schwann brigade to stand down and let the party past, and that was cool. Now I'll also say it was a bit too quick and unexamined, both his treachery and then resurrection as if nothing else had happened. At least everyone got in a few good hits. But I wish they had discussed more about what that meant that Raven had been in the knights...talk about his history, give a little timeline as to how he was a double agent with the Don...did the Don know, or guess? That sort of thing. Anyway it was still much better than Alexei.

Regarding part of the real villain's later plan, this game never survives fridge logic, ever.

The Heracles war machine is marching on the capital, and going to destroy it! If not smashing it to bits, firing on it with a giant cannon. The party thinks Alexei is on board, but he's not! It was an elaborate ruse to waste their time dealing with it while he was elsewhere carrying out his evil plans! Except...the "elsewhere" he was at was the capital. If the party didn't stop the Heracles I can think of zero reason he would want it destroying the very location where he's chilling out doing evil things for days.

Literally days, which is something else I don't get. After seeing Alexei and Estelle on the roof of the castle, the party gets blown away and explicitly needs a doctor to treat their wounds and stays overnight at inns twice for plot reasons, and likely several more times just for gameplay purposes. Then they make their way across an entire continent to confront Alexei on the roof of the castle where they first saw him.
Did...Alexei have some sandwiches and blankets up there? Did he give some to Estelle?

to send it toward the capital where you are, rather than away from it. March on Dahngrest so your enemies are distracted in the complete opposite direction. Unless his plan would've been to get into the Hermes for transport to Zaude.

Because as we saw, a ton of stuff went wrong and he almost had all of his plans ruined. If we'd decided to go straight to the capital instead, maybe to help set up defenses against the Hermes for example, Zagi would've still wrecked it and Alexei wouldn't have had his uninterrupted week of formula shenanigans to mess with Estelle and the barrier.

to send it toward the capital where you are, rather than away from it. March on Dahngrest so your enemies are distracted in the complete opposite direction. Unless his plan would've been to get into the Hermes for transport to Zaude.

Because as we saw, a ton of stuff went wrong and he almost had all of his plans ruined. If we'd decided to go straight to the capital instead, maybe to help set up defenses against the Hermes for example, Zagi would've still wrecked it and Alexei wouldn't have had his uninterrupted week of formula shenanigans to mess with Estelle and the barrier.

On the other hand, keeping Heracles near the capitol would discourage Phaeroh from interfering.

Whoever localized this game was one of those people under the impression that the phrase "all of a sudden" is actually "all of the sudden." Seen it three times now, never spoken aloud. I guess it has always been Rita saying it, so maybe she's mistaken and not the localizer?!

I want to talk about the loc but I'm not sure how much of the sausage factory I can reveal. we get to see a bit more of the whole deal than
I can say that it was a blast(ia) loc'ing this from En-Us to Pt-Br.

I can't imagine it's not true. It has to be. People working on the game got that name stuck in their heads and they just loved it.

BTW that guy did a great job in Abyss IMO. Underrated entry in the series. Abyss had a MUCH better set of back stories for everyone. You even find out why a joke character quirk like Guy being afraid of women has a surprisingly emotional origin.

I looked up the TVTropes page on Vesperia and the section about back stories said something like "surprisingly for a game in the Tales franchise, almost no one has any back story to speak of except Raven."

I had high, high hopes for Repede. I thought for sure he was going to be interesting. He's got a giant scar and bling all over him and he's smoking a pipe!

Literally this is Repede:

For a while I wasn't even sure if he was a dog. His reactions made it clear he could understand what characters were saying, Yuri has a skit where he says "he doesn't think of himself as a dog" so I was like "ooh is he some kind of esper thing, at some point in the story is he going to start talking outright, 'yeah I just don't normally have that much to say,' it's gonna be great."

He's just a dog. His pipe has a boring explanation in a side story movie they had to make because they realized they forgot to give the main characters back story.

And I hate the Zombie enemies. In a game where getting hit with any status ailment reduces your maximum combo and could lock you out of your burst action, an enemy who casts a fast-casting spell that covers most of the battlefield and has a high chance to inflict a minor status ailment is just the worst. And these guys come in packs.

Having teenaged RPG leads is really cool until you stop being a teenager yourself. Do you remember being seventeen? You're a dumbass at seventeen! I wanna be saved by the guy who's twenty-seven. He's at least payed taxes. He knows how to do shit. He can drive.